


Adequate Vocabulary

by kirazi



Series: Winterfell Sequence [2]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: And Makes Some Better Ones, Angst, Annoying Little Brothers, Confessions, F/M, Feelings, Idiots in Love, Jaime Lannister Considers His Suboptimal Life Choices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 02:10:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18714376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirazi/pseuds/kirazi
Summary: “I’m not sleeping with her,” he tells Tyrion, which is possibly the stupidest lie he’s told in a lifetime distinguished for them, first of all because it’s factually incorrect—they’ve spent the past two nights sharing a bed, and half the North must have heard about it by now—and more importantly, because it’s almost certainly going to be an untruth ineverysense of the word if he can just make it to nightfall without being arrested for murdering the Hand of the Queen.(Jaime and Tyrion talk about Brienne; Jaime and Brienne talk about Cersei. Among other things.)





	Adequate Vocabulary

**Author's Note:**

> Oops, I did it again, because I can't stop thinking about these two. A sequel to "Rescued Again", from Jaime's POV. Starts out somewhat light-hearted, but there's angst ahoy, along the way to a temporary safe harbor. They don't actually (quite) get it on in this, but stay tuned, because my brain is still 100% ruined by this pairing.

The moment when Jaime knows, finally and definitively, that the past few days haven’t just been a bizarre fever dream induced by an overdose of poppy milk while he slowly expires of his wounds somewhere in the ruins of Winterfell, is when he’s overcome with the deeply familiar desire to strangle his little brother.

“I’m not sleeping with her,” he tells Tyrion, which is possibly the stupidest lie he’s told in a lifetime distinguished for them, first of all because it’s factually incorrect—they’ve spent the past two nights sharing a bed, and half the North must have heard about it by now—and more importantly, because it’s almost certainly going to be an untruth in _every_ sense of the word if he can just make it to nightfall without being arrested for murdering the Hand of the Queen.

Tyrion rolls his eyes, unimpressed; he’s always been a more competent liar. It runs in the family. “I don’t really have an opinion on whether or not you should talk to her before or after you finally get around to fucking, although in my experience, ladies tend to prefer the former”—Jaime unfolds his clenched fist and conveys his assessment of this fraternal advice via the type of gesture that would cause a knife fight in Flea Bottom—“all I’m saying is, you ought to have some kind of conversation with the woman about your obvious feelings for her. Using words. Full sentences, if you can manage it.”

Jaime glares at him. “And what in the seven hells do you think I should say?”

It gets worse, because Tyrion's expression is more pitying than mocking. “You’ve been following her around like a mournful hound since you got here. If I want to find you in a crowded room, these days, all I’ve got to do is look for the only person there who’s taller and blonder than you, and then look about two feet to the side.”

That’s fucking unfair, a low blow, especially because Brienne is on the other side of the goddamn castle right now, helping Sansa plan the reorganization of the remnants of the Stark forces into new units. It’s the first time they’ve been apart for more than five minutes since the eve of the battle, and the feeling is maddening, like an itch under his collar, slowly driving him to distraction. By now, he’s almost ready to start stabbing something, and they’ve already burned all the fucking wights. He puts his face in his hand and groans.

“I know you’re conditioned to respond to terrifying women with lust, not to mention a total abandonment of any impulse towards self-preservation, but sweet gods, you’re even farther gone than I’d thought. Jaime, are you _in love_ with her?” He doesn’t respond, and he supposes that's clear enough an answer, at least to anyone who knows him as well as Tyrion. Which is to say: one person, maybe two.

When finally he looks up again, there’s an odd, almost wistful smile on his brother’s scarred face. “She’s worth it, you know. I can’t believe I lived long enough to see you fall for someone I can truly say that for.”

Jaime wants to bite back, almost wants to give into the instinctive reflex to defend himself, defend their sister, restate all the justifications he’s recited so many times. It’s an old argument; they’ve had it on countless occasions. But the impulse is all that remains; the feeling that used to burn underneath it has been extinguished, and the irritation drains out of him like water, leaving him empty.

“I know,” he tells Tyrion. “I know she is. That’s the problem. I’m perfectly capable of finding the words”—and that’s another lie, actually, he has no vocabulary adequate to the task of explaining what it felt like to stare at her sleeping face in the morning light, to sense the implicit strength of the sword-trained muscles in her back under his palm, to rejoice at the ridiculous, perfect sound she’d made when he’d finally kissed her back, brimming with intent—“but she knows who I am, what I’ve done, and there aren’t any pretty words that are going to make that worthy of her.”

Tyrion's looking argumentative, like he's forgotten they're not still in a courtroom. “She stood up in front of a room full of powerful people who at that point wanted very dearly to kill you, and called you a man of honor.”

“I know,” Jaime repeats, helplessly. He does. He knows that she wants him anyway, that she loves him. And he wants to give her everything she hasn’t yet been able to bring herself to ask for, at least not with words, instead of her shining eyes. But he can’t shake the fear that he’s bound to just give her heartbreak instead, no matter his best intentions, that any hand he can offer in return for hers will only ever be base metal, gilted with false gold.

He can’t feint, so he parries. “What the hell are you doing sitting here interrogating me, anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be helping your queen plan her march south to roast a few more of our bannermen?”

“She’s your queen now too,” Tyrion reminds him, predictable as a parrot on that point.

“And they’re not our bannermen; yes, I know. I thought I made that clear enough this morning.” He’d made his oath freely, but that doesn’t mean he’s required to be happy about it, or that he’s ready to trust his brother’s judgment in this matter, even if it’s usually proven sounder than his own.

Tyrion’s fiddling with the buttons on his doublet, fingers worrying at the metal. “She’s not quite…herself, at the moment. She needs time to mourn. It’s not only Mormont—the Dothraki are her kin, in every sense that matters to her, and she’s just lost the majority of them, and while the Unsullied are devoted to her as their liberator, I doubt that makes it any easier to come to terms with bringing them to a freezing shithole to be slaughtered en masse by a bunch of dead foreigners. And there’s something going on between her and Snow.”

Jaime shoots him an exasperated glance—he knows exactly what’s going on between her and Snow, as does Tyrion; everyone from here to Moat Cailin probably knows—but Tyrion dismisses it with an irritated wave of his hand. “I don’t mean the obvious. Something else has happened—before the battle, they were acting strange around each other. I figured I might as well stay out of the way for an afternoon, and see if they find the time to sort it out.”

“You can imagine how reassuring I find it to hear you fretting about the fickle temperament of a Targaryen monarch with a pair of fucking dragons at her disposal,” he tells his brother, although he supposes it’s an ungrateful thing to say, since the beasts had quite recently and helpfully incinerated several thousand dead men charging in his general direction, and more importantly, Brienne’s.

Tyrion’s not amused. “If you want to talk about mad queens, we probably ought to start closer to home. Is that why you’re being such an idiot about your noble Ser Brienne? I saw the way you were looking at her when you knighted her, you know. I’m not so short that I couldn’t see your face.”

Jaime just sighs, and stares at the floor. At least half the people who’d watched him kneel and swear fealty to another Targaryen just that morning were probably now laying bets on how long it would take him to switch sides and ride south. He can’t even bring himself to blame them—it’s not like he hasn’t shown the world over and over again what they should expect him to choose. What he’d always chosen, even as he grew to hate himself for it, every single time he’d been offered a choice, until the last one. That’s the thing that’s weighing on him, now, because he’s always refused to explain himself in the face of the world’s scorn, except once: to Brienne, her face wary across a bathtub in Harrenhal, and he doesn’t know what he’ll say if she asks him to explain this.

Tyrion breaks the silence, finally. “Does she know about the baby?”

Jaime grimaces; shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t know. Probably? It certainly seems like everyone else in fucking Winterfell is extremely well-acquainted with the history of my bad decisions. Or so I gather, from the overheard commentary. We haven’t really discussed it.”

They haven’t really discussed much of anything, is the thing; there hasn’t been time. They’ve been operating on instinct, staying close, keeping company during the day, and keeping each other warm at night. They’ve kissed a handful of times, and he’d promised to take up the gauntlet she’d thrown him yesterday morning, astonished with delight at her sudden boldness in his arms. But it had been the start of a day filled with funerals, topped off with the least celebratory victory feast—if you could call that somber gathering under the scorched rafters of the hall a feast—in all his long experience of war. When it ended they’d stumbled back to her room and collapsed into the bed, and he’d just curled himself around her warm body and held her until sleep claimed them both. This morning they’d woken to find themselves even more sore than the day before, bruises blossoming into their full range of color. Brienne had just grimaced, flexing her shoulders, and then she’d tucked her head next to his and looped an arm around his chest, lying there with him, their fingers trading soothing little touches, until it was time to get up again. She’d followed him into the hall and watched him swear his oath, and she must know, more than anyone else in that room, that he means to keep it, even if it costs him his life, even if it costs him—and he can’t bring himself to say it aloud—his child. So he’s almost certainly doomed to be forsworn either way. _I charge you to defend the innocent_ , he’d said in the firelight, standing in front of the last person in the world who needed to be told to do so. But there’s not much in this world that’s more innocent than a baby, however corrupt the circumstances of its making. Joffrey was a monster, and he knows it, can’t deny it even to himself, but Myrcella and Tommen were good, and he’d failed them all.

The clunk of metal against wood interrupts the vicious circle of his thoughts, and he looks up and sees that Tyrion’s poured a cup of wine and set it down next to him. Jaime almost refuses it, but he knows his brother’s kindness is more easily expressed in gestures than in words. It’s one of the things they’ve always had in common. So he picks up the cup, raising it to meet his brother’s, and drinks.

“I’ll talk to her tonight,” he says.

***

It’s later than he expects when she finally makes it back to her chamber; whatever counsel she’s been keeping with Sansa kept her busy until well after sunset. He’s got a fire going, the room finally almost actually warm, and there’s a plate of bread and hard cheese and some apples on the table, in case she’d been too absorbed in her work to remember to eat. She comes inside and takes it all in with one sweeping glance, and doesn’t even say anything, just smiles at the sight of him, grateful but not surprised—like it’s normal, like this could be any conventional evening in a life they’d built together to share, and the force of it hits him like floodwater; he goes down under it like grass.

By the time she’s crossed the room to him—he’s risen to his feet without realizing it—he’s surfacing again, lungs bursting for air. She leans in to kiss him, softly, a palm on his forearm, still sweetly unaccustomed to this, and her gentle awkwardness is the most endearing thing he’s ever witnessed in his life. His mind is still buzzing with all his worries and reservations, but he silences them in a fierce act of will, and puts his arms around her and kisses her back, breathing in the smell of her, sweat and woodsmoke and skin.

He lets go, reluctantly, and waves a gesture at the chair—“Come sit down, my lady—Ser,” relishing the way her eyes crinkle at his correction. “Can I pour you some wine? There’s food, if you want it; though I hope someone already brought you a better supper.”

“All right,” she says, clearly humoring him, “I’ll have a cup. And yes, there was rabbit stew and a rather good pie. I’m glad they’ve got the ovens back in order.” That doesn’t stop her from tearing the end from the loaf, though, and crumbling off a piece of the cheese. It’s good to see her appetite returning, and some color that’s not bruising coming back into her cheeks. He wants to stare at her face forever, observe every detail of it illuminated by the firelight. He feels like the biggest idiot in the seven kingdoms, and he can’t make himself stop. They sit, sharing the simple meal, sipping wine, and fill each other in on the hours they’d spent apart, although he omits a number of salient details from his account of the conversation with Tyrion. She’s in the middle of asking him a sensible question about how best to arrange half-trained infantry in tandem with longbowmen when his unspoken worry starts to well up again and she breaks off mid-sentence.

She pauses for a moment, and says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t—I know it can’t be pleasant for you, to talk about plans for the campaign.”

Jaime heaves out a lungful of pent-up air. “I’m not going to stay here and freeze while you ride south with an army. I made my pledge today; I may as well make myself as useful as I can.”

“No one expects you to ride into battle against your own kin—”

“Really?” he interrupts. “I suspect Daenerys Targaryen does. And it’s her right to do so, now.”

Brienne is quiet for a moment, watching him across the table. “I would not.”

And that’s the heart of it: she wouldn’t ask it of him, but he still owes it to her, if he’s to have any hope of being worthy of this, of a future that he can fill with quiet evenings by the fire in her company. He scrubs his hand across his face, and tries to find the words.

“I made a choice when I rode north,” he tells her. “I don’t think I’d have been able to make it, if not for you.” He risks a quick glance at her face; she’s watching him, her expression steady, but her eyes are wide and vulnerable; they’re both putting themselves at risk now. “I don’t know what, or how much, you want to know,” he continues, “but you have the right to ask, and I’ll do my best to tell you. About my family, about Cersei”—sweet fucking Seven, it’s hard to even say the name aloud to her—“about the children. I can’t justify all the choices I’ve made in this life, or even apologize for them—well, not all of them. But I’ll tell you what they were, and explain what you ask me to. I’ll try, at least.”

His heart is hammering in his chest, and this is almost more terrifying than facing down the army of the dead: the worst they could have done was kill him, after all. He’s still trying to work up the courage to look at her again when she stands up and reaches for the wine, and he’s startled into staring while she carefully refills both their cups, nearly to the brim, and sets the jug back down. She looks back at him, and nods, just once, and says, “All right. But not like this.”

Jaime watches, bewildered, as she toes off her low boots, and walks over to the bed with a cup in each hand, setting them down on the low trestle next to it. She comes back to his side, and reaches for his hand—it’s shaking, he realizes—and tugs him up, pulling him over to the bed and nudging him to sit down. It’s only sheer force of habit that prompts him to pull his boots off first; and then he pauses for a moment and removes his hand and sets that down too. He feels Brienne’s weight settle down on the mattress beside him, and she shoves him over gently until their backs are to the wall, where she’s pushed one of the furs, a barrier against the chill stone. She drapes another around their shoulders, and reaches over and picks up the wine, passing one cup to him and taking the other. Then she leans back next to him, so they’re facing the fire and not one another, and says, quiet and firm, “Start wherever’s easiest,” and Jaime closes his eyes and holds his breath in, because it’s that, or cry.

It’s a minute or so before he’s got himself under control enough to take a sip of the wine, and then he begins. “Until I was six, or maybe seven, I didn’t really understand that I was a separate person,” he says, and he tells her about what it was like, to be always accompanied by the other half of himself, those sunlit years of running and laughing and playing in the salt-sweet air of Casterly Rock. They’d have never got away with it as long as they had if their mother hadn’t been ill, and their father in desperate denial about the state of her health, the rest of his attention occupied with money and politics and war. It wasn’t until their education had started in earnest—him out in the stables and training yard with the masters-at-arms, his sister penned up in a drawing room doing needlework under the eye of a septa—that it started to become clear they were being set onto separate paths, and they’d have to bend the world to their will if they were ever going to draw themselves back together. He tells her about how Tywin would call them both into his office to quiz them about their lessons, about facts and figures and matters of state, and how his sister always shone more brightly—their father’s true heir—and what it did to them each in turn, to come of age amid his frustration and her fury at the always-unspoken judgment: _she should have been the son, not you._

He tries to articulate what it was like to watch his beloved sister, his lover, the only person he’d ever told the truth about Aerys, be bartered away to a boorish lecher whose only virtue was a half-decade or so of military prowess, pissed away soon thereafter in a lifetime of drinking and whoring and hunting. He explains how it would have been a betrayal to take up a birthright he’d never earned while she sat choking in humiliation in a gilded cage in King’s Landing, and how the only thing he could do about it was promise to stay at her side, to serve as her protector and her secret and her revenge. It’s not entirely one-sided; Brienne speaks too, asking a number of forthright questions, and tells him a little about her own experiences in return, things he’s mostly guessed at in outline—he remembers taunting her with some of his more obvious deductions in the early days of their acquaintance, and loathes himself for it—now coming into clearer focus through the limited details she offers. But it’s part of why he can stand to tell her at all; she must have tasted something of that hopelessness and anger herself, even if she’d been blessed with a better father, and the strength and determination to fight her way out of the trap of her girlhood with her spirit intact.

He does his best to give an honest accounting; he tells the truth about Cersei’s vices: her temper and vanity and selfishness, her lifelong viciousness to Tyrion, and the cruel, vengeful streak he’d always tried to rationalize as a response to a world that never recognized her real virtues, her cleverness and endurance and force of will. He still can’t be sure if what she has become now is the inevitable result of some innate flaw in her character, or the outcome of decades of accumulated loss and anger and thwarted potential, and what, if anything, he could have done to stop it. There’s Joffrey, strong evidence for the prosecution, and Tommen and Myrcella, shoring up the defense.

By the time he tells her about his daughter, about the only one of his children who’d known him for what he was, the wine is long gone, the cups set empty on the floor, and he’s stopped trying to hold back tears. It’s easier to speak without them choking his throat, so he just lets them run down his face and dampen his beard while he talks, his voice quiet and steady in the darkening room. The fire's burned low, and he has no idea how much time has passed, but when he looks down, he realizes Brienne is holding his hand. He falls silent, and eventually she asks, as frank as ever, “The child she’s carrying now—is it yours?”

There’s nothing to say to that but the truth. “I don’t know. But she told me it was, and I believed her, and it’s certainly—possible, even likely, given the timing.” He doesn’t spell out what that means; it’s obvious enough. “I suppose it could have been Euron Greyjoy—that’s whose name she’ll give it now, I expect—or someone else, while I was away sacking Highgarden on her behalf. I don’t know. I’m not sure it matters.” Either way, the child’s still innocent, and still his kin.

“What are you going to do?”

“Beg Daenerys for its life, if we win. Tyrion will support me, on that, and she might actually listen to him. That’s all I can do. I can’t go back—even if I wanted to, she’d almost certainly have me killed as soon as I set foot in King’s Landing. She—she came close to it already, when I left.” He pauses, some part of him still reeling at the memory. “The chances aren’t good, but they’ll be better if the baby comes before the war is over. I don’t think the _mother of dragons_ would actually insist on executing a pregnant woman, instead of waiting a month or two for the birth, but Cersei won’t give her the option. She’ll never let herself be taken alive. If I’m part of the campaign, there’s a better chance of being in place to act if we find an opportunity to get the child out.”

Brienne nods. “It’s—it’s a good plan,” she tells him. “But I’m sorry you have to make it.” She’s still holding his hand, and it’s almost too much to bear, that she’s offering him sympathy for being caught in a trap he’d made for himself. He’d only gone back to Cersei’s bed a handful of times in his last months in King’s Landing, but it didn’t matter; the point was that he’d gone back at all, that he hadn’t just ridden away, forever, the day he’d returned to the city to find smoke rising over the ruin at its core, their last child dead and his sister crowned atop the rubble of all his nightmares. Remaining at her side then had felt like habit—easy, in his grief, to stumble back to the familiar comfort of her arms—but he knows it was weakness, too.

Brienne shifts, beside him, and stifles a yawn. “We ought to get some sleep,” she says, “it’s late, and it will be warmer under the blankets,” and he turns and looks at her in shock; after everything he’s said, she still wants him to stay? His surprise must be apparent, because she looks faintly exasperated and says, “What, did you think I was going to kick you out to sleep in the stables?”

“The hallway, at the very least,” he replies, a little numbly, the riposte coming almost automatically to his tongue even as the rest of him is still dazed, trying to make sense of this.

Brienne doesn’t glare, or roll her eyes. Instead, she just looks at him, solemn, and pauses, like she’s searching for the right words. Finally, she says, “I knew about—about the things you’ve done. I already knew what they were, if not always why you'd done them, and now I know some of that, too. If I wanted to send you away, I’d have done it before now.” She pauses again. “You said you made a choice when you came north. I meant it when I said I’d fight alongside you, and I did. If you’re choosing to—to stay alongside me, that’s all I need to know. Are you?”

Jaime breathes out. “I would be honored to, my lady. Ser. If you’ll have me.”

She must—she must see, what it means to him, because she puts her arms around him and pulls him close, lets him hide his face in her shoulder. He’s run out of tears, so he just stays there, trembling, for a long moment, and another moment more. He looks up at her face, her patient, open face, and leans in to kiss her, just once, venting an unsteady laugh.

“I did promise my brother I’d talk to you tonight. I expect he meant something more along the lines of, oh, make a courtly and poetic declaration of your love before you take her to bed and ravish each other, but I’ve never been good at following his advice properly even when he's—" he breaks off, suddenly, realizing that his mouth has got ahead of the rest of him, again, and then he sees how Brienne’s whole face is flushing, her eyes wide and a little disbelieving, still. _Oh_. He recaptures her hand.

“Oh my lady, did you truly not know?” She swallows, and gives a little shake of her head, speechless, and he just pulls her close again, whispering the words against her skin, saying her name, again and again.

Eventually she must believe him, because when he draws back to look at her again her eyes are shining with tears and something that might actually be joy, bright as the embers of the dying fire. This time she’s the one who leans in to kiss him, and there’s a new confidence in it, an assurance that hadn’t been there even when she’d made that first bold move yesterday morning, here in this bed.

With that thought, he’s overwhelmingly and powerfully aware of the bed, of their bodies, of the next choice before him. He’s breathing in the scent of her hair and her skin, feeling every separate place where his body is touching hers, and he’s suddenly, almost painfully, hard. He trails his hand down over her side, and waits for her to catch her breath and meet his eyes again.

“It’s late,” he says, echoing her earlier words, “and we ought to get some sleep, but—if you want, first, we could—”

“Ravish each other?” she finishes for him, and then blushes again, like she’s shocked at herself for saying it. He grins, and lets his fingers stroke along the length of bare skin where her shirt has ridden up at the waist, feeling her breath hitch in response.

“If you’ll have me,” he tells her, again.


End file.
